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This article was posted to the Usenet group alt.hackers in 1995; any technical information is probably outdated.

Re: What is the... This one?


Article: 7555 of alt.hackers
From: vea@alkymi.unit.no (Eivind Vea)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: What is the... This one?
Date: 27 Mar 1995 21:20:30 GMT
Organization: Norwegian Institute of Technology
Lines: 27
Sender: vea@vann.alkymi.unit.no (Eivind Vea)
Approved: Yep.
Message-ID: 3l7a6u$lq@due.unit.no
NNTP-Posting-Host: vann.alkymi.unit.no
Status: RO


In article <3l4nc5$207@illuminati.io.com>, marlowe@io.com (marlowe)
writes:

| So, I'll bite. Does anyone know what the security hole is in finger? I
| can understand not wanting to have anyone be able to finger in, but why
| wouldn't the admins what me to finger out?

Well, in addition to what the others already have mentioned, I know
this one:

ObFingerHack:

If the fingerdaemon at your site supports .fingerrc-files, then you may
put a script in a .fingerrc-file. This will get started by the daemon,
thus running as user "nobody". It's possible to start off other
processes
as user "nobody", and you can for instance get yourself a
nobody-shell.

It really isn't a securityhole, because nobody usually doesn't have any
privileges you don't have yourself. On the other hand, it could be used
for faking mail etc... :-)

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eivind Vea     vea@alkymi.unit.no |       Old blondes never fade,
   http://www.stud.unit.no/~vea   |         they just dye away
------------------------------------------------------------------------




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